(Houghton Mifflin, $20.) "A Year in Provence" meets "Le Mariage" in this epistolary first novel. Significantly, the only successful member of Adrian's group is an old lady who writes doggerel about her cats. This hopeless pursuit - and Adrian's increasing disenchantment with Blair and the Iraq war - underpin a story that gently tweaks many aspects of life in contemporary Britain: condo-loft conversions (Adrian buys one at "The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf," overlooking a canal inhabited by viciously territorial swans), credit card debt, New Agers and writers' groups. It is autumn 2002, and Adrian is quarreling with a travel agent who won't refund the £57.10 deposit for a vacation he canceled when Tony Blair announced Saddam Hussein needed only 45 minutes to deploy weapons that could demolish Cyprus. This latest installment finds him on the downslope, post-marriage and post-fame, 34 years old and working in a bookstore back in his native Leicester. In successive diaries, Townsend followed Adrian through marriage and fatherhood, and success as a chef at a trendy London restaurant with his own TV cooking show. (Soho, $24.) In "The Adrian Mole Diaries," a success of near-Potteresque proportions back in the mid-1980's, Townsend set her hero's teenage angst against the more serious travails of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. ADRIAN MOLE AND THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.
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